The other day, while venturing in Ruwi, I witnessed my first flooding in the Muscat city area. It was one of the first days in November and an unexpected rain poured down heavily onto the city. At first, in the car, it seemed to be just raining hard but when I arrived in Ruwi to get out of the car, within two seconds of being outside, my abaya, hair, and scarf was drenched in heavy rain drops. It felt kind of nice actually with the dense humidity and heat in the air to have a natural shower but I quickly ran inside for fear of my hearing aides becoming wet. My hearing aides are not waterproof.
As I watched from the open doors of the Muscat Security Market, I observed the flooding of the street that runs through Ruwi and parallel to the canal. As the rain poured down harder, it seemed that the roads were flooding more and more. There was a massive amount of water filling up into many areas of the streets and overflowing onto the curbs. Perhaps if the roads are designed differently with some sort of drainage, the water would have more places to escape when falling from the sky. As I watched many people in the traditional Indian dish-dashas yank up their peach or blue pants to tread through the growing flooding in the streets to the traffic, I began to wonder what types of problems arise that I normally wouldn’t think of when this type of flash flood happens. Do people get electrocuted? Does work get cancelled?
While I was standing at the entry way of the Muscat Security Market, there were about 10 Omani men in their formal dish-dasha wear who seemed to be employed at the Market, just standing for at least an hour watching the rain and not working. I wondered if it was a cultural thing to just enjoy rare natural occurrences together and not worry about working. I tried to make up scenarios in my head that could be similar to what they seemed to be experiences while at work. Perhaps American employees would possibly find it appropriate to stop work and watch out the window talking and conversing for an hour or so if we were under attack by a giant hurricane that might eat us up alive and they were trying to figure out or wait to hear on the news what to do. Maybe this flash flood was similar in a sense (but obviously very different because no was fearful of their life...it seemed). All I know though, is if there was the type of flooding in the streets in New York City, I don’t feel that people would react the way they did for nearly as long as the people at the MSC did so. I liked watching them happily enjoying the natural occurrence together. Colleagues conversing and taking in whatever seemed to come at them in the day and stopping to take it all in. It left me wishing in a way that this type of thing would be a familiar sight when there is a rare heavy rain occur at a security market in New York City!
Apparently, I was just naive in my observations because I did not know what possibilities lay ahead because of the floods. I looked up the news and there were several stories about causalities, electrocution, cars that were lifted away and smashed in the water, and buildings flooded inside. It was a lot worse than I imagined so the observing colleagues at the MSC seemed to make more sense to me afterwards.
I read about the tragedy of an 8 year old boy who was waiting for his father and got electrocuted on the terrace by their fence at home because of the water. There were massive traffic jams of which many turned into complete wrecks of cars that had been lifted away by the water and smashed into the cars in front of them near the Al Nahda hospital in Ruwi. In some parts of Muscat, according to reports by BBC News, the visibility reached nearly zero and there were even “cuts in mains electricity and water supply”. I was surprised to continue reading and find out that around 20,000 people were actually evacuated out of Oman! The results of this flood was because of a Cyclone called Gonu that has traveled through areas of the Middle East with winds of over 150 miles per hour and it’s starting to finally mellow out, alhumdellelah. This was a much more serious issue than it seemed to me at first as a flood at home would not be as serious it seems.
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